How are you managing timetabling data into Canvas?

Currently, we are integrating student data into Canvas via our Student Administration System (SAMS) which takes all student enrolments within a course offering, and creates a Canvas section and enrols the students into the Canvas course shell.

For example, if we have 300 students enrolled in Cooking101 for Term 1, 300 students will appear in the Canvas section.

Additionally, we have a timetable management system, which takes the 300 students, and provides them with the option to select smaller class sizes, which means we need to break the 300 students down in Canvas, to be sections of (for example) 30 students (so, 10 sections).

This leaves us in a conundrum, as the students are then enrolled multiple times into the course, and we lose section functionality (such as locking students, forming groups etc.) due to the students being in both sections.

We wanted to reach out to you all, and ask how you are handling student enrolment data in Canvas that may come from more than one source? Are you possibly creating course shells for each timetabled class? Are you timetabling outside of Canvas entirely? Are you wrangling sections somehow?

Hopefully, we are not the only ones in this situation and someone has already solved this!

Howdy Jayde,Great question, and something we have had to ponder and get working in recent times. Our enrolments process works in this way:

1st Level (course with no timetable activities) - Students are enrolled from our SIS (Technology One) into Canvas (default section).

2nd Level (course with timetable activities) - For courses that we mark in our administrative tool needing to pull activities from our Timetabling System, students are enrolled into sections for the activities they are assigned to. If they are not yet allocated into activities, we put them into the default section. We then listen for events where students have changed their activity enrolment, if they later allocate themselves to a lecture/tutorial/lab etc, we add them to the new section, test the new section enrolment exists, and then remove them from the default section programatically.

3rd Level (course without timetable activities that becomes one needing activities) - This works very similarly to 2nd level, all the students will exist in the default section. Once we enable activities integration, the new section enrolments are added, and the default section enrolment removed.

Some things to note with this:

1. This requires you to pick an activity type to enrol, for example, if you enrol lectures, and tutorials, for a single course, you basically end up in the same predicament. Therefore, we recommend to users they pic just the tutorials (as an example).

2. This requires us to blend data from our Student Information System, and the Timetabling System, in a single integration process. It has required us to program the logic of when a user should and shouldn't be in the default section, and when and how to remove them. We utilise IBM Message Broker to listen for the data from numerous sources, blend it into what we need, and then push the details into Canvas using the API.

This is a wonderful help - and aligned with what we were also drafting on the whiteboard as a solution so it's comforting to know you went through the same and came out with a similar end game!

I'll pass this on to my team to confirm we are on the right track - and will come back if we have any further questions, I'll also come back and share our solution as well once we finalise so others can view too.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I have read through your reply, and have something to clarify with you if I may. When you mentioned "remove" students from default section and put them to the new lec/tut/prac sections. Did you actually delete the enrollment or inactive?

If deleting, what would happen to the students work made when they are active in default section? If inactiviting, will teachers see them inactive in Gradebook section view?

No worries at all. That is indeed a good question which we went back and forth on repeatedly. I am 99% sure we opted to inactivate the enrolment. This does have the result of the content remaining but being unattributed. To get around this, you can re-activate the enrolment and the content becomes re-attributed to the student.

I believe the lecturer will then see them as inactive in the Gradebook section view.

However, to ensure my understanding is correct (as it has been a while since I went through this) I am going to ping my good friend Kiran, who is the senior in my team and did a significant amount of testing on this.

He should also be able to answer the second question for you as well. I am not in the office this week, but will ask him to jump on and give you some thoughts next week, if he doesn't get a chance before then.

As Stuart mentioned, we did make the students inactive(not delete) in the default section when the students are allocated to a new section. This way the students show up as assigned to the correct sections in the people tab (for academics) and in the grade book section view the students will be shown inactive if you choose to view the inactive students. However, we do have a census date where all students get allocated to an activity/section after this particular date and so there should not be any students enrolled in the default section after this date and the default section will be of no use in Canvas.

Thanks very much for providing further details on your approach. I have done some testing on 'inactive', and some of the observed results concern me. I would like to check if you have experienced the same and how you resolved them.

The business scenario is

John Smith is enrolled in Accounting 101, his enrollment is added to Canvas SAMS section with 'active' status.

John then selected his lecture and Tutorial in Timetabling system, these information are picked up by daily csv and sent to Canvas for processing

In Canvas, John's enrollment status for SAMS section is updated to 'inactive' and then his name is added to Canvas additional sections: 'Lect 1' and 'Tut 1' with active status

Observation/ concerns are:

When the course teacher view people page, he can see John is enrolled in 'Lect 1' , 'Tut 1' as well as SAMS section. Roles are displayed only for sections which he has active enrollment. However the roles and the name of the sections are not aligned. It is confusing for teacher to identify who are 'active' students.

On Course setting >Sections tab> SAMS section page, all active/inactive users are displayed together, we are not able t find a way to differentiate who are active on this page.

Lets suppose an assignment is created for section A only, once students are moved from Section A to Section B ('inactive' in section A, 'active' in section B), this user is still able to submit this assignment. (in order to prevent student submitting Section A assignment, the enrollment has to be 'deleted')

Assignment cannot be created/assigned to Timetabling sections

I wonder if you have experienced the same, and is there anything we can do to minimize the confusions?

Kiran may be able to help with more of this, but I have filled in the blanks where I can:

Observation/ concerns are:

When the course teacher view people page, he can see John is enrolled in 'Lect 1' , 'Tut 1' as well as SAMS section. Roles are displayed only for sections which he has active enrollment.However the roles and the name of the sections are not aligned. It is confusing for teacher to identify who are 'active' students.

I will admit we haven't had anyone raise this as a concern (as of yet). This is something we will need to look into further.

On Course setting >Sections tab> SAMS section page, all active/inactive users are displayed together, we are not able t find a way to differentiate who are active on this page.

That is correct, unfortunately we haven't found a way to distinguish these either. This could be a good candidate for you to log a feature idea!

Lets suppose an assignment is created for section A only, once students are moved from Section A to Section B ('inactive' in section A, 'active' in section B), this user is still able to submit this assignment. (in order to prevent student submitting Section A assignment, the enrollment has to be 'deleted')

This is something we certainly weren't aware of. I can see cases for and against as to why this would be both a benefit and a problem.

Assignment cannot be created/assigned to Timetabling sections

Can you possibly provide some more information here please? You mentioned above that you have created an assignment for section A only, how does that differ from Timetabling sections?

Looking through everything, I can say you have definitely done your homework, and to a greater degree than we have yet had the chance. I can see that some of these items could be great candidates to be added as feature ideas within the community, as well as possibly being added to the APAC Areas of Priority document for discussion to see if there are other institutions in APAC this affects who could band together and champion it.

Depending on how the discussion goes, I would definitely encourage you to log these as feature ideas and champion them within APAC and the wider community to help get visibility on them.

Lets suppose an assignment is created for section A only, once students are moved from Section A to Section B ('inactive' in section A, 'active' in section B), this user is still able to submit this assignment. (in order to prevent student submitting Section A assignment, the enrollment has to be 'deleted')

This is something we certainly weren't aware of. I can see cases for and against as to why this would be both a benefit and a problem.

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Section A refers to a SAMS section and Section B refers to a Timetabling section. After students are removed (SAMS section status ='inactive') from SAMS section to Timetabling section, students are still able to submit assignments only assigned to SAMS section. I guess it is probably not a bad thing, as it is likely that teachers want to create an assignment for all enrolled users.

Do you foresee any issues?

Assignment cannot be created/assigned to Timetabling sections

Can you possibly provide some more information here please? You mentioned above that you have created an assignment for section A only, how does that differ from Timetabling sections?

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Teachers are not able to assign an Assignment only for one/more of Timetabling sections. When a teacher creates an Assignment, under 'Assign' section, options to assign it to a group sections is displayed, however ALL Timetabling sections are NOT listed here. If SAMS section is chosen, after clicking Save&publish, a warning of not all sections will be assigned to the item, however I am not able to include any of the Timetabling sections. Hopeful what I described here make sense :-)